Monday February 17, 7pm
YES: Furen Dai / Jeff Weber
In person only
Q&A w/ the artists
Microscope is excited to kick off its 15th season of Event Series with a screening of film and video works by New York-based artists Furen Dai and Jeff Weber, as part of our emerging artist series YES. All films will be projected in their original 16mm and 35mm formats, the latter of which will be screened at the gallery for the first time. The event will take place in person and will be followed by a Q&A with the artists.
Jeff Weber’s short films — which are all shot in b&w 35mm film and frequently less than one minute in length — occupy two distinct realms. In lyrical documents, such as those of a university picket line or a flock of pigeons competing for seeds outside his window, Weber is concerned with the personal and diaristic as he seeks to use 35mm film as others use their phones to share moments of their daily lives on social media. While in a series of flicker films, he adopts physics, machine learning, and algorithms to create frame-by-frame sequences of black, white, and grey tones corresponding to scores generated by artificial neural networks, sine wave frequencies, and even by the brain waves of Dai as she was watching one of such films.
In her works, Furen Dai addresses, often satirically and in performative ways, architecture, sociological enigmas, language, and cultural tropes, among other subjects. A newly completed piece — which begins as a 16mm film and ends on video — focuses on the small community of Chautauqua, NY, in which the artist attended a residency. The work combines imagery of buildings, streets, and the nearby lake shot by the artist on 16mm film, as well as notions of reality and utopia as voiced by AI, with short movie clips appropriated from the online movie database 0xDB. Two additional single-channel video works pairing video and audio recorded by the artist with computer generated elements are based on Dai’s research of the marriage market and the “complex issue of gender and value in contemporary Chinese society.”
Both Dai and Weber will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.
General Admission: $9
Members Admission: $7
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Furen Dai (b. Changsha, China) is an artist whose work explores the origins of language and how categorization structures and systems function within a broader social and political context. Anchored in sculpture, her practice challenges these very notions and expands across film, publishing, drawing, fresco painting and photography, taking into account the exploration of material, display, lighting, architecture, and text. Her work has been recently exhibited and commissioned by Broodthaers Society of America, New England Triennial, Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, National Art Center, Tokyo, and Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. Dai has received fellowships at MacDowell, Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin, International Studio and Curatorial Programs, and Art OMI. Her work has been featured in Artforum, LEAP Magazine, The New York Review, Boston Globe, and Boston Art Review. She has contributed writing to Asia Art Archive and Best!: Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts published by Paper Monument. Dai holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is currently a Lecturer at Parsons School of Design, The New School in New York and Co-curator of the Lagos Biennial 2026. Previously, she served as Director of Programs and Collections at Asia Art Archive in America.
Jeff Weber is an artist based in New York. He is the founder of the Kunsthalle Leipzig, a conceptual project in the form of an institution he established in 2012 as an extension of his photographic and filmic practice. The subsequent work in the form of a book An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology / Kunsthalle Leipzig was published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam and presented at KW Berlin in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include Serial Grey at Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nimes, France (2021), Camouflage at lxbxh, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2020), Mimetic Assimilation at Erna Hecey Gallery, Luxembourg (2019). His work has also been exhibited at Mudam Museum, Luxembourg; de Appel, Amsterdam; Foto Museum, Winterthur; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Belvedere21, Vienna; Casino – Forum d’Art Contemporain, Luxembourg. Weber earned his MFA from the La Cambre art school in Brussels (2010) and was an artist-in-residence at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2011-2012). He is also the co-founder and artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, New York, and currently a lecturer at Parsons School of Design, The New School. He received a research fellowship (2024-2026) from the Thinking Tools research group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium.
